Sacred Mountains and the Search for Meaning in Post-Disaster Japan
In this compelling narrative of discovery set in Japan's remote Dewa Sanzan mountain range, Shayne A. P. Dahl describes Shugendo, a secretive religious tradition that combines aspects of Shinto, Buddhism, and mountain worship. As a participant-observer, Dahl invites readers into the practices of contemporary ascetics who see the sacred mountains ......
Presents a systematic critique of Edward Saids work "Orientalism". This book looks at the destructive influence of Saids study on the history of Western painting, especially of the 19th century, and shows how the epigones of Said have succeeded in relegating thousands of first-class paintings to the lofts and storage rooms of major museums.
In The Goddess in the Mirror, Tulasi Srinivas offers a pathbreaking ethnography of contemporary Indian beauty parlors in Bangalore. Exploring the gendered world of beauty in the intimate spaces of the salon, whose popularity has exploded amid an urban tech revolution, Srinivas invites us to consider what beauty is and what it does. Visiting ......
The Formation of Racial Habits in American Theater
In this book, Josephine Lee looks at the intertwined racial representations of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American theater. In minstrelsy, melodrama, vaudeville, and musicals, both white and African American performers enacted blackface characterizations alongside oriental stereotypes of opulence and deception, comic servitude, and ......
Leading scholars examine China's global strategic plans, from Hong Kong to military power, to economic dominance Over the past few decades, China has increasingly challenged the global influence of the United States. In China's Grand Strategy, David B. H. Denoon brings together a group of eminent scholars to explain China's rapid ascendance on ......
India and Nuclear Asia will fill a gap in the outside world's knowledge by focusing on the post-1998 evolution of Indian nuclear thought, its arsenal, its rivalry with Pakistan and China, and New Delhi's nonproliferation policy, and by showing how India's nuclear trajectory has evolved in response to domestic, regional, and global drivers.
The ninth and tenth centuries witnessed the establishment of a substantial network of maritime trade across the Indian Ocean, providing the real-life background to the Sinbad tales. An exceptional exemplar of Arabic travel writing, Accounts of China and India is a compilation of reports and anecdotes about the lands and peoples of this diverse ......
Centering his analysis in the dynamic forces of modern East Asian history, Kuan-Hsing Chen recasts cultural studies as a politically urgent global endeavor. He argues that the intellectual and subjective work of decolonization begun across East Asia after the Second World War was stalled by the cold war. At the same time, the work of ......
The dramatic impact of Islamic fundamentalism in recent years has skewed our image of Islamic history and culture. Stereotypes depict Islamic societies as economically backward, hyper-patriarchal, and fanatically religious. But in fact, the Islamic world encompasses a great diversity of cultures and a great deal of variation within those cultures ......
